Investigating Ideological Manipulation in Subtitling Based on Farahzad’s CDA Model: A Case Study of The Salesman

MA in Translation Studies, Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran

Abstract

Translation plays an important role in conveying and manipulating ideologies. Accordingly, this study sought to analyze the ideological elements in the English subtitles of the Persian movie The Salesman. The framework to find the driven ideological strategies in the translation of the Persian audio of the same movie was based on the critical discourse analysis (CDA) model inspired by Fairclough and proposed by Farahzad. Following the data analysis, the researchers found that the most frequently applied ideological manipulation strategies were related to social power relationship. Next came ideologically significant lexical choices fol- lowed by agency. The fourth most frequently applied ideological manipulation strategies were traces of both modality and nominalization while the least frequent strategies were tense, positive/negative, and coordina- tion/subordination. Furthermore, no samples of passivization/activization as means of ideological manipula- tion were found. Moreover, the translator had used frequent strategies such as deletion and addition, which were not included in the very same model. Ultimately, the study revealed that ideological manipulation oc- curred mostly in subjects concerning the rights of women in society, the patriarchal system of Iran, religious expression in daily conversation, as well as Iranian norms and their religious culture. The findings further proved the significance of ideology and power relations in the text and the ubiquitous need to be aware of the means of representing ideology in texts and thus how to analyze texts ideologically.